Animations historically have been based on a rapidly displayed series of drawings or images, which produce the appearance of one image or scene changing or moving. The simplest approach involves thumbing through a stack of drawings, which can produce a simple animation effect lasting a second or two. Animations have long been produced as film-based movies, such as cartoons based on a sequence of drawings, which are captured as frames on the film. Generally, an animation can be termed a time-based media, in which a series of frames are displayed in sequence over a period of time, resulting in the animated effect of one moving image. The time allowed for the display of each separate frame is critical in determining the rate of display, thus affecting the speed with which the animated image or scene appears to change or move.
Each animation usually includes a background or scene, and one or more components of interest that appear to move in front of the background. A component is a graphic image of an identifiable entity in the time-based media. For example, if the animation is of a deer running through a forest, then the background is the forest, and the component of interest is the deer.
Computer systems have long provided software programs that create and display moving graphic images or animations on the computer screen. On the computer, the image is stored as electronic data, usually as a software graphic file or bitmap of an image. Typically, these software programs provide a way to create and link a series of software graphic images that can be displayed in a sequence of frames to produce an animation. These software programs may be provided as several separate programs, or may be combined as one animation creation, editing, and display application.
For most types of animation, a single frame can usually be extracted without great difficulty. However, the result is a static image of an entire scene. For example, if the animation is of an deer running through a forest, a frame can be extracted that shows the whole frame of a deer frozen in motion against the background of the forest.
One objective of the present invention is to extract a component from a time-based media as a graphic object, separate from the original media, that can be displayed and modified separately. Thus, for the example given above, the objective is to extract the animated deer from the animation as a separate component that can be displayed as a separate animated graphic object on a computer system.